STATEN ISLAND, NY — Sea View Playwright’s Chapel Theater is small — it
holds about 75 patrons — but it acts big, big enough to launch the new
season with Eugene O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms,” a towering
20th-century dramatic challenge.

SVPT has presented six or seven
O’Neills, including “ A Moon for the Misbegotten,” “A Touch of the Poet”
and “Iceman Cometh.” (Richard DeSena, who will play the patriarch in
“Desire,” played Con Melody in “A Touch of the Poet” three seasons back).

This isn’t the company’s first “Desire Under the Elms” although it is a first for founding director Joseph Gheraldi. That alone is strange. Gheraldi is a huge O’Neill fan. Playwright’s nearly 40-year attachment to the playwright is his doing.

“Desire Under the Elms” takes place on a hardscrabble New England farm around 1850. Ephraim Cabot, a stern widower of 70 and his three sons work the farm. Suffering is abundant in this household and adultery and murder are in the wings.

As the play begins, Cabot has returned home after an extended absence, with a new bride, nearly 40 years his junior.

Gheraldi, who likes to elaborate on the Greek roots (it springs from Euripides’ Hippolytus) and the eternal of issues of “Desire Under the Elms” recently discussed the setting, characters, the whiff of melodrama in the script and the ties that connect the play with stories like “Downton Abbey.

Q: The opening sentences of the script, describing the setting — the farmhouse and the overhanging elms — suggest that we’re entering a dangerous place. It’s unusual for O’Neill to give the location of the action so much power, isn’t it? A: Actually, the trees provide the only softness that exists anywhere on the harsh Cabot farm. The trees were probably modeled after O’Neill’s Monte Cristo Cottage, I think we’re supposed to think of them as protective, as stand-ins for the wives that Cabot worked to death.

Q: Eben, the youngest son, is a complex character: Weak and strong, moral and immoral. Does he resemble other characters in O’Neill’s plays? A: I think he’s a composite of other young male characters in other O’Neill plays including “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” and “Beyond the Horizon. Eben is sensitive, lean and handsome, like O’Neill himself. He’s a figure of contrasts, Puritanical on the outside, while inside there’s all this fire going on.

Q: Ephraim, the patriarch, is a Big Daddy with few redeeming qualities. Is he a monster?

No reservations; tickets on sale at the box office 30 minutes before each performance

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A: He’s very representative of conflict with fathers and sons. Both halves are conflicted. The fathers seem hateful at first, but as the play goes on, sons often seem to see another side of their fathers.

I think we begin to see that a bit of tenderness creeps in. Ephraim is a stern Calvinist, trying to live by God’s principles. He’s old, but extremely vital. He has the drive of someone in their 40s or 50s.

By the end of the play, Ephraim has a deep sense of belonging to something and he becomes a tragic character. He belongs to the earth, to God and to his fundamentalist principles. He’s going to stay in the stay in the yoke.

Q: Unlike O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” “Desire” isn’t universally loved. It has been accused of resorting to melodrama. What do you say? A: O’Neill has some melodrama. I think he absorbed it watching his father, the famous actor, playing the Count of Monte Cristo, and there is melodrama in the plays.

Q: The only widely produced O’Neill comedy is “Ah Wilderness!” Have you ever directed it? A: Down the road I hope to do it. Even “Wilderness” is kind of autobiographical of O’Neill. The family in the play represents two things: A family he knew growing up and a kind of ideal, the way he wished his own family was.

Q: Do you think that popularity of stories like “Downton Abbey” confirms that there’s always a place for dramas where there’s a lot at stake: Prosperity, happiness, love, honor?A: Absolutely theater is eternal, so there is always a place on stage for human experience. We always have remember that human behavior hasn’t changed since the beginning of time.

— Check the S.I. Culture Calendar listings on pages 2-3 for showtime and ticket information for SVPT’s run of “Desire Under the Elms.”